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World’s only freshwater porpoise on brink of extinction

THERE’S now only one cetacean species in the Yangtze river, and it is in serious danger of extinction.

Just six years after the Yangtze river dolphin was declared extinct – the first cetacean to disappear thanks to human activity – the Yangtze finless porpoise has been labelled as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Sam Turvey of the Zoological Society of London and the IUCN Cetacean Specialist Group, and colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, used records of dead and stranded porpoises to model the Yangtze’s porpoise population. They conclude that it crashed by 52 per cent between 1991 and 2006 and predict that the porpoise will go extinct in a matter of decades. A survey at the end of 2012 shows an even more startling decline. “In 2008 we estimated a population of 1100 to 1200 in the main river, whereas the end-2012 survey had a population estimate of only around 500 animals,” says Turvey. There may be a few hundred more in interconnected lake systems.

The Yangtze services the needs of hundreds of millions of people, and Turvey blames collisions with river traffic, pollution and accidental fishing by-catch for the decline. “This is a wake-up call to the world to try to get it right for Yangtze cetaceans a second time round,” he says, and suggests a breeding programme in the oxbow lakes adjacent to the river.

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This is a wake-up call to the world to try and get it right for Yangtze cetaceans the second time around

This article appeared in print under the headline “Not fit for porpoise”